That exact scam happened to my coworker earlier this year. Her adult son is in the navy and someone called my coworker's mother and said that her grandson killed someone in a car accident and that he was arrested and needed 10 grand sent to his 'lawyer' right now. She called my coworker and she was panicking, but luckily another coworker and I were able to calm her down enough to get her to call the son before doing anything else. We spent the hour it took to reach the son telling her that no emergency needs payment immediately and they are counting on her and her mother to panic. Not only was the son fine, he was on a boat when this all happened and even if he was in port, his truck was broke down so no driving anyways. These scams prey on emotion and when you take a moment to think things through they tend to fall apart.
1. That’s horrible but I’m glad she was stopped before she made that mistake. 2. I am so sorry, but it’s worth: “another coworker and I were able to clam her down” clam lol
That's why they target women. Now realize that the exact same tactics work with politics and tricking people into who to vote for. Who do women vote for?
These games are also used in random steam key bundles that promise to give you only positive rated games. 99% of these bundles are filled with these games.
I've gotten a few bad games from them but I've also got some good ones too. Usually when they bundled them and I felt like gamba for 5 bucks for 5-6 games or whatever.
Where exactly do these happen? Because if you're talking about the likes of Fanatical, that's above board but also filled largely with cheaper lower rated products. Which might make it appealing to try and get your asset flip into that pipeline, but the system itself is perfectly legit (beyond how you feel about it acting as a lottery).
@@GrandHighGamer I know G2A offers random key packages and I'd imagine some of the other grey market sites do the same. I've seen them advertised in the past with an average key value which was horribly inflated because of these stupidly marked up games that aren't normally purchased at full price.
One thing that I wish Valve would do that could defeat these scams, start taking reviews of key redeemers into account when generating the game's review rating. Currently, it's only those who bought the game.
4:37 Someone called my grandpa claiming to be “his oldest grandson” and tried scamming him with this fake bail nonsense. I’m his only grandson. He laughed, told them to call someone else, and hung up. Now whenever I call him I always say “it’s your oldest grandson” and we both laugh
They know full well they are gonna get laughed at %99 of the time. if you don't fall for the scam, it wasn't meant for you. someone else out there will fall for it.
They tried to pull that bail scam on my grandfather. But they tried to make it seem like I reached out to him because I wouldn't want to tell my parents, but was okay with him knowing. He was like "Yeah, I am not who he would reach out to, this isn't real". LOL. Okay Papa...you are right...but WOW.
Happened to my aunt as well. She was on to them pretty much from the start, but she played along for a bit to see what kind of story they would spin. They told her that I was in a traffic accident, that I got into a fight with the person who I was in the accident with, and got charged with assault, and that I needed bail money. She just told them no, then called me up to tell me about it. It was very strange that they pretended to be me and not one of her actual children, but who knows what goes through these scammers brains.
Nope. Bribery is super illegal. Just ask former senator Menendez about that. The legal version is called speaking fees or the advance on all those books that get ghost written by the politician, or the cushy position on some executive board or thinktank when the politician leaves office.
@@ObadiahtheSlim Getting a position on a board of some council that no-one has ever heard of with a baffling salary is a common practice. Like some " Lower New Jersey Water Sanitation Cultural Impact Study Board" type shenanigans
@@Greaseman762 noo not a bribe, a gratuity after the fact, totally legit. Even if promised before the act was done, but not paid till after the fact, all good.
Scammers can also rely on convenient timing or insiders working for an associate of the targeted person. My dad was asked for additional money to complete a shipment, which just happened to be around the time he was expecting a large, expensive tractor implement. The scammer wasn't able to answer simple questions like the weight, delivery address, or cost of the item, but the situation almost seemed reasonable before those questions were posed.
I had something almost like that. This was just after the UK left the EU and shipping between the UK and EU got back on track. At this time I worked for Games Workshop at my local warhammer store within the EU. I had ordered some minis for myself, and as per usual had them shipped to the shop so they come in with the stock. Half a week or so later I get a text message, supposedly from UPS (who does shipping for Games Workshop) regarding import costs. The thing is, because I work for the company I knew this wouldn't be an issue. I reported this scam to my boss and sent a copy to UPS of course. These days I regularly get emails as well with regards to supposed packages being on the way but requiring me to do something to finish delivery, even without anything on the way. The funniest thing about those are the DHL ones because they contain codes but because I currently work for DHL in their sorting process I actually know for a fact the codes are completely wrong and just randomly made up strings of numbers, as DHL usually (there are exceptions) works with a specific kind of format.
Neighbour had a Macbook they hadn't ordered show up at their home. A different courier from the same company turned up about 20 minutes later saying they'd make a mistake and asking for it back. Thing is, the package did have his name and address on. He got suspicious and refused, even after the 'courier' called the warehouse to 'confirm' he was legit. Shut the door and called the seller. They confirmed a laptop had been bought on credit in his name. If he'd handed it over he'd have been on the hook for it.
This almost happened with my Grandma too. Except they pretended to be me in jail, and told her to ship it cash via FedEx to my "lawyer". My grandma had actually gave FedEx the package and drove home. Luckily my older brother was there for lunch and called me and drove her back there and they hadn't shipped it out yet and they were able to get it back. Then I got to have a lovely conversation with the scammer over the phone and definitely didn't use any hacking skills I had acquired at any point in time.
I saved a neighbor from a similar scam. Scammer called him, said they were a sheriff and they had an arrest warrant for him, give them 5k in itunes gift cards to pay it off and it'll go away. His wife was terminally ill and he couldn't afford to be 5 minutes from her side, let alone the threat of being in jail. So, I saw him running around frantically, asked him what was going on. When he told me, I told him pretty much the same thing: It's a scam, if you had a legit arrest warrant they would have been kicking down your door, not wanting itunes gift cards. Go report it, go to your bank, lock everything down, etc.
Yeah, i wouldve laughed the scammer out of thag call the moment they said "itunes giftcards" Not credit. Not cash. Not debit. Not even a Visa. Frickin ITUNES! 😂 Like, how dense do you have to be to set up an ENTIRE SCAM and ask for ITUNES GIFTCARDS?
@@Domboss2019 someone who would pay them in itunes gift cards is someone who is going to fall fully for their scam though. it’s a pretty good screening method to prevent people from reporting them, i guess. idk what they do with them once they have them though. resell maybe?
This happens on black Friday as well. They hike the price up weeks before, then black Friday comes around and are able to sell it for the same price they were selling it previously as a "deal"
That one happens all the time on Amazon as well. There'll be a major site wide sale going on, but most of the items "on sale" are actually at their original price, and they simply raised the base price before using the sale to bring it back down.
@@randinho8872 not only that, but stores also use a similar technique to say the sale is "up to 80% off". They'll mark down a bunch of random accessories to 80% off but then anything of value lucky to get more than 15% off.
Hence why I wishlist stuff I want and watch the price. If they jack it up I know that company is full of shit and I find a different company selling it to buy from.
@@andretimpa I use Keepa for Amazon which tracks how much products were before and during any sort of Amazon special days and Steamdb to find out where the cheapest country is to feasibly buy games cheaper from 🤣
@TheHyperfilthered red snapper very tasty. Or do you want is inside the box? She chose the box! What is inside the box? Nothing? Absolutely nothing? Stupid! You're so stupid! UHF, i love that movie
I love how the guy says that the steam thing “isn’t how money laundering really works”. Then describes how money laundering works that can definitely be achieved via the steam bundles. I think it’s just his manner of speech but it’s interesting
Reminds me of that one time I got called to be notified that I had gotten into an accident and had to pay for operating fees... all because my own number was my emergency contact during an event.
Worth noting the scammers you talk about often ask for something stranger than a simple wire transfer, like a prepaid debit card from walmart or a gift card. Bank tellers are more likely to recognize these scams and have more obligation to prevent people from getting owned by them than a walmart employee. For a lot of people this would be an obvious sign this isn't official, but if you're an elderly person who's already behind the times regarding technology and money, that's a different story.
Here's something interesting. In some places, if you refuse to sell someone gift cards, you can lose your job. Not many jobs allow you to refuse service to someone. So if you work at say, Walmart, or Kroger's, or a dollar store. You have no choice but to sell these $400 worth of gift cards to old mawmaw.
@@RedCyberLizzie I don't know if that's true anywhere, but it's definitely not true at Walmart. Regular cashiers are specifically not allowed to sell gift cards over a certain amount or large numbers of them, and the service desk people who _are_ allowed to are told to check for those scams and refuse the sale if it sounds off.
There is a fairly straightforward rule you can teach your relatives to deal with this. There is no legitimate entity in the universe who will accept a gift card as payment for any good or service, except for the company that issued it. Anyone who asks for gift cards as payment, for anything, is a scammer or some other kind of criminal, unless their logo is on the gift card. (Technical exception: There are a few small businesses who will barter off-brand gift cards for goods and services, if the customer is unable to afford a necessary product such as food. They do not call people and ask for gift cards, and it is certainly not their preferred form of payment.) For that matter, anyone who calls and asks you to pay them right now is probably a scammer or a collections agent. Legitimate creditors will send you a bill or paperwork of some kind, and will generally expect payment within some number of business days, not "right now."
@@grimwolf9988Saw this happen yesterday actually. Lady in front of me troed to buy a $500 apple card and a $50 one, but there is a maximum of $500 per customer per day. Caused a whole situation with managers asking if she was buying them as gifts or cause someone told her too.
From having seen Kitboga the last year, the scammers have upped their game. They are actually using wire transfers now, they just go out of their way to make sure their target shares as little info as possible.
Yeah, my grandparents were saved by the fact they are always friendly with their bank teller who told them it was probably a scam and they should check on it before they do anything. Still boils my blood to this day that someone almost got thousands of dollars out of them using my name. Not only that but my grandma was confused enough that she was convinced that I had tried to scam her out of money, more than likely she passed away believing that.
I'm so glad Thor is always warning against jumping to conclusions. It is so common nowadays especially online for people to just instantly label something without any proof.
Like that time when he said everyone complaining about AC: Shadows were all just racists who were angry about having a black protagonist? I guarantee not a single person has ever said that to him or anyone else. Yet there he went happily spouting journalist-tier slop. No issue jumping to conclusions there, but woe is me for potentially misusing the phrase "money laundering" cuz yeah that'd be such a tragedy omg 🙄🙄🙄
@@armandoalvarado5840 lets not act like all racist on twitter didn t jump on the occasion to rant about AC shadow. Like you can t ignore the people that spammed the picture of a monkey in samurai armor.
it really bugs me that steam allows the fact that all publishers (including AAA) can say "games on sale UP TO 90%!" and its always for games that i dont care about and buried with games i want.
A word of advice about scammers in general: don't you ever dare to think that you're too smart/informed to be scammed by anyone. Scammers are always inventing new and nuanced ways to trick people. Always have your guard up/question things.
Money laundering was a right pain in the arse when I worked at the bookies. Used to get people come in, put couple grand in a betting machine then print the ticket off without making a bet, you then hand them back the clean money.
"How Much Money Can We Launder In A Day?" by Boy Boy on TH-cam showed this to a tee. A lot of the bookies there straight up didn't care that they were doing this.
@ellagage1256 I work as an AML Investigator for a bank that has millions of customers. Whilst I can empathise with the fact that you might not get treat fairly, when you realise that the money you're helping launder can be supporting human trafficking or people being exploited for their bodies, I'd rather act with integrity and think about the impact I could have on victims.
I work for a regional bank in the US and I see scams like these alarmingly often. I have seen threats of cp, hurt or jailed family members, romantic partners, even fake jobs with REAL paperwork and forms. It is truly terrible, and the amount of paranoia we have to walk around with in our day-to-day jobs is rather disheartening. Please stay vigilant and ask "why" to everything.
@@Dazllingston it’s to keep them busy. If you repeatedly respond with “Why” you’ll waste the scammers time to protect elderly victims they could be trying to get rather than you. Eventually they will leave of course but it works for a solid bit. I think “Ok” is better though because they’ll repeatedly think you’re going to give them what you want so they’ll go for longer.
@@goldengold8513 i think they were trying to be cheeky by applying the advice of asking why to everything by asking why to said advice _about_ asking why
2:40 precision in language is so important and feels lost these days, especially when people will casually say stuff like "i got hacked." no, you were probably a victim of social engineering and freely gave away what information was required for you to be "hacked." if you're not precise in defining the problem or what's happening, it just serves to obfuscate the problem more.
If you think about it though, they're right. They got hacked, as in their human self got hacked, rather than their computer system or account getting hacked.
"Hacking" is just a pretty broad word, it doesn't automatically imply some kind of breach or tech security issue, social engineering counts. The general point any accurate language is true though
@@Cruxin I've done some CTFs and I have regular training on my company. From what I remember the definition of hacking is (aka the most commonly accepted) to intentionally getting unauthorized access to a devices or network. This also includes prolonging accesses for more than you should and tricking people into giving you access
My dad almost got scammed of everything in his bank account before. We were talking and his phone rang. Apparently it was "America Bank". I thought nothing of it at first, so I left. As soon as I stepped foot in my room, I knew I was missing something very important. I managed to sprint back and convince my dad to hang up. It took nearly 4-5 minutes of me questioning when my dad finally asked what bank the caller was from and realized that America Bank is not a bank we are affiliated with.
Holy crap, that exact thing happened to my Grandma. She hung up on them to go get the money and then "called me back" to ask a question. She called my actual phone, though, so I was able to help her calm down and see what was happening. I have never in my life been so enraged. I don't like violence, but I would have 100% undone those people if they were in front of me at any time that day.
Friend of mine almost had his aunt getting scammed by the encryption scam. Sole reason she didn't get scammed was because she acted normal, she got the message that she has to pay up or all her data will be lost and since she didn't have gift cards at home she obviously turned off the PC while getting them - when she came back it was gone, as it was the average one that's just a browser pop up. The scammers essentially lost their "income" by someone doing the unexpected (just like in your case): Acting normal despite falling for it. But agreed on the anger towards them, if there's a group of people that deserves all the hate than it's cowards like them, they don't even have the balls to be actual cowards that backstab people, so now that I'm thinking about it calling them cowards might actually be an insult towards cowards as they don't even reach that height of being respectable.
Yeah...but at the same time he basically all but confirmed it is. Even though it's jumping to conclusions. It's jumping to conclusions in the same way as if you find your child with chocolate all over their face, it's jumping to conclusions to determine that they have been eating their Halloween candy without permission. Because they could have been eating their sisters candy...
True but also keep in mind it can happen to everyone. Everyone has sometimes a laps in judgement or moments when they aren't careful enough. Thinking that it can only happen to stupid people is the 1st step to getting scammed one day.
@@louieberg2942 Yeah, all those bot comments are full of typos for instance. A person of average awareness is going to see through it immediately, and that's not their target demographic. They're using the typos, and other methods, to clear out everybody but vulnerable potential marks. Incredibly predatory.
It's also an incredibly arrogant, cruel and rather ableist thing to say. First, people don't choose how intelligent they are, nor do they choose their place of education in their formative years. Acting like you're somehow better for being smarter is completely absurd. You got lucky, stfu. You may well be intelligent, but the only trait you have that you had any actual choice in is being an a**hole. Second, many scams are specifically targeted at the vulnerable, the deteriorating, or the mentally impaired. These actors rely in part on ableism - this attitude of "oh well, it doesn't affect me, so I won't share any thought for the victims because I'm smort" - to continue their operations unimpeded by the people who can stop it.
My elderly mom just got mail that said her house insurance was about to expire, and she is approved for 3 year home insurance from what looked like her credit union. I told her it was a scam, and not to contact them. I hate these scammers with a passion.
There was an interesting scam going around, people received letters about pirating some show and if they didn't pay up x amount they'd take them to court. "We got all the IP logs" ect. it was 100% targeted at parents or just plain gullible people. I got like 3 different letters trying to get money from me, and I've never watched any of them and never even heard of 2 of them. I think my mom got one too and called me to ask what this meant since she's lived alone for years and years. I told her to used it as tinder and tell all the people she knows to do the same. What I remember they bought some info from ISP brokers and carpet bombed everyone on their lists with those letters whenever they did anything or not.
I was getting these weekly for months after I bought my first house a couple years ago! I mailed back the return slips for several of them after filling them with rocks, hoping the post office charges them!
very refreshing to see someone use the phrase "copyright strike" instead of "copystrike" lol does this bother anyone else or do i need to end it all asap via my 2004 toyota avalon?
I work at a CPA firm and I want to say that what Thor is referring to is converting credit card money into clean money so it's not traceable, but it is not how we would define laundering. Laundering businesses absolutely can and often are owned by the individuals who commit crimes, it is about taking money already untraceable and in your posession and funneling it through a legal business as "paying customers" so that tax can be paid on it and deposited in the bank accounts as legally earned money. Two different things.
To make sure I get what you're saying: "Laundering" is specifically for money that isn't legitimately in the banking system, and therefore hasn't had tax payed on it so any spending done with them would immediate bring the IRS to your door. With the stolen credit cards thing, the money is already legally in the system, you're just obfuscating the path from the money to you that way you can't be implicated with the theft. Assuming I got all that correct, is there a separate term for that second one?
@ Yea, basically. If I have your credit card information and I want to get money out of it without the police finding me I run a scam to get the money without it being directly traceable to me. That's not technically laundering how we think of it when it comes to financial crimes. Laundering is "I have all this money by illegal means already, how can I spend it and explain where it came from?", so you run it through a legitimate business as sales revenue and boom, you've created a legitimate paper trail for the funds. Laundering is something the guy from Thor's example would do after he obtained the money if it were a substantial sum, like say $50,000-$100,000.
From what is shown, I counted over 20+ games listed as $199 (that's 4k at least.) The total is listed as 10k and on sale at 92% off for a total price of $800, which is 92% off. Thor highlights that "only a few are marked down", but in reality, the whole thing is. The individual marked down games have their own separate sale, and the others are full price outside of this deal. Sure, there's no reasons that they should be $199, but the way this is presented is... "only a few of them are on sale", when they technically all are within this bundle. The implication is that it says "92% off" because "a few of the games are on sale", when the total price is actually 92% off. The scam here is more akin to price gouging. It's still totally a scam, but this presentation and reasoning is horrible. I'm a bit disappointed no one else noticed this and a little disappointed in Thor for presenting it this way.
Yeah..I did notice that on screen there's like 15 games on screen for 200..which would be 3000 so the numbers don't add up the way he presented otherwise the bundle would still be like 3k from those games alone that wernt marked down.
I worked in retail and the amount of older men buying $500 worth of Amazon gift cards for a "fiancé" they've never met seemed way higher than you'd expect. I'd ask them if they were sure about this, if they actually met the other person, etc., but the more you implied that they might be getting scammed the more defensive they'd get so we'd let them complete the transaction to avoid causing a scene but it always felt bad. We also had scammers calling the store directly posing as our IT department and trying to get gift card codes over the phone. My coworker went as far as to activate hundreds of dollars in Apple gift cards before he realized something wasn't right, but thankfully he refused to read codes over the phone.
4:30 this happened to my grandparents to. The exact same scam. I walked in the door 5 minutes after they paid the person and I gotta say I've never seen a man go from worried to pissed at themselves so fast before or since.
Can you imagine almost scamming a nice old lady out of $10k and then finding out later that was Thor's grandmother? That's like running over a dog in a getaway from a bank heist and then later finding out that dog belonged to John Wick.
Common one like with your grandma is the "It's me" scam. They call up older people and say "Hey grandma it's me." and grandma will go "Jimmy?" or "Johnny" or whatever and let the older person fill in who they think is calling them. After that it's usually a "I'm in jail and need bail money" or something along those lines.
It's like cold reading, à la mediums and psychics. The other party fills in the gaps for you if you prime them to do it. If the scammed person doesn't play ball, they move on. Sick, sick game.
Pretty sure there was a case recently of a bussiness (might have just been a person) getting bankcrupted cause hacker used ai to fake being their boss and convinced the vp to "invest" in some scam thingy.
My favorite money laundering trick, is when you have made fake bills. You used to in ancient times, actually launder it to roughen it up a bit. Because crisp bills are super sketch apparanrly
well yea, if you saw someone walk into your place of work in ragged clothes and they start handing over crisp just-printed 100's you would understandably be more concerned than a construction worker handing you a ratter roll of 100's that look smeared in sweat and grease from a day of work. sometimes construction workers go to places for a power tool or 3 needed for a job and the manager gives them either a card or cash...though its usually a card in current year.
4:26 My grandfather was called once with the claim that I had been arrested in Florida and needed bail. He wasn’t sure about it so he gave my dad a call asking if I was ok. He responded yea he’s doing some yard work with me right now. We were at home in Massachusetts. Thank god he called us first
My grandma got a similar scam call about my cousin in jail. She knew it was probably a scam, but wanted to be sure, so she asked to hear his voice. They hung up.
Same issue you had with your Grandma happened to one of my tenants in low income housing. Lady was emotional and crying when she came down the elevator. She told me what happened, but was very reluctant to do so. I called the police to my office and had her explain the situation and give over as much information as possible for them to identify the caller. I do not know if anything ever came of it. I remember that lady thinking she would never see your grown daughter again. I had to almost force her to call the daughter, there is something about shame and fear that allows this scam to happen and should be explained to older parents. At some point when your parents become incapable of making good decisions is when many sons and daughters start taking over accounts and explaining these scams, I warn you: "It is never soon enough".
Small point of reference, it's only money laundering if both parties are aware that it's money laundering. If for example someone offers someone else $1000 to give them $700 back, is it suspicious? Of course, but unless the second party knows it's criminal there is no crime being perpetrated on their end. It's called plausible deniability. And this goes back to the way the legal system works. In order to prove that money laundering occurred one of the elements you have to prove is INTENT. Without intent, there is no crime. So as much as the legal authorities may hate it, they can't actually charge an unwilling party with money laundering and secure a conviction. Which is why in a vast majority of the cases they try to scare the party into a plea deal.
@@louieberg2942 no, because it isn't a contractual obligation. The only way there's due diligence is if there's a written contract. Generally when it's a person to person transaction it's never required. Most of the time you'll see it only in giant business transactions between companies or property.
No, you should automatically assume something is wrong, why would someone give you 1k for you to sent 700$ back, there no other choice then cleaning money. There is really no suspicion to have its quite clear. You should never accept this kind of transaction, because none of these kind of transactions would be legitimate
@@siyano suspicion is not proof. And that's the point. The legal system is clear about this, you have plausible deniability until they can prove you don't.
I am pretty sure you are still in the trouble ether way, and this is one of those 'cops can't tell lies' type of myth. IDK though, in general taking legal knowledge from the comment section on youtube is not advisable
Id assume yes because it's still illegally acquired money, if the streamer is unaware and just wanted to keep the money they probably would have it confiscated
@@siqsteen Lets be honest here, as shocking as it may be, EVERY company is about making money, hell even non-profit companies need to manage and procure funds from somewhere, but Steam, whether they are greedy or not, is still one of the companies that is trying to provide a good service, precisely because they want people to keep using it so they can make more money. So yeah, it's baffling that scammers can operate on the platform so openly and for a long period of time, because it makes Steam look bad, which in turn erodes the trust and confidence of potential customers.
Steam is one of the less greedy companies out there lol. A 30% cut for reputation, customer service, payment / refund handler, foruns, gift system, controller support, etc is a fair cut.
Nice explanation. I used to work in a hotel resort in reservations and we would sometimes get huge reservation requests and the person would pay one way (bank transfer/credit card) and right before the cancellation window they would email us pleading, saying their house got foreclosed, their dog died, they crashed their car, their wife has cancer (sometime multiple of these all in one email lol) and that in that chaos they lost access to their original payment method. Then they would ask to get the refund on a different bank account/credit card etc. They were relatively easy to spot, but if you booked this reservation and charged them, you would be in a world of trouble with our manager lolol
My Grandma got targeted by the same scam. If not for the fact that I never get in trouble like that they might’ve got her. I’m terrified of how these scams will evolve due to AI.
Man I've had to tell likely over a 1000 people "Sorry mate I'm afraid you have been scammed, please contact your bank and the police." Comes in waves and yes heartbreakingly it's all to often the elderly.
My grandmother called me once while I was at work, and I was like, yeah I'm fine, just at work. It was a money jail or debt or some sort of scam thing, and she was savvy enough to call me first. Only ever happened once. I was in the cafeteria doing one of my rounds as a security guard at a government contractor site, I was in the kitchen and I wished her well. I haven't forgotten it because it was such an interesting call to have.
Yeah, I love that point about not jumping to conclusions. Something involving money can be bad without being a scam. People throw that word around way too easily.
a couple of weeks ago in germany there was this elderly guy who countered a scammer and made him meetup at the bank - with a police parade - though in this kind of scenario, the young scammer was (probably) only a tool for a bigger ring. A couple of weeks beforehand, an elderly couple elongated the phone conversation with the scammers, so while she was talking with the scammers, her husband called the police to counteract.
It's kind of mind-blowing to think there are whole office spaces dedicated to these sorts of schemes. Makes you wonder how many people must fall for it if they're investing that much money.
@@Herr_Affe Here's the thing: You don't need that many people to fall for it for it all to be worth it. If you're from some country with a much lower minimum wage (e.g. most of Eastern Europe), manpower is relatively cheap and attempting these scams is actually quite fast. If every call (even failed ones) takes 15 minutes, you can do 32 of them in an 8 hour day. If 1/1,000 people fall for it, that's ~1 month of 8 hours a day work for one scam. That sounds like it shouldn't be economical, but in a country where the average wage is
My grandparents got the "he's in jail" scam, we hadn't had contact in years, but they hung up because it was an Indian caller lol Even older folks are getting to the point they just hang up on Indian callers, because it's usually scammers.
"High prices is not money laundering" *Immeadeatly describes how x person would use high prices to obtain money to launder it* I love you maldavius. keep doing what you're doing
Wonderful and succinct explanation of money laundering, and how it differs from the scam. Steam need to get a team on this sort of thing, but, as you have mentioned before, IT is the least appreciated, least funded, and usually the lowest staffed portion of any corporation. More users pointing these things out may move Steam in the right direction, but only if Steam does not care about the loss of revenue. New subscriber, so it's my first comment. I do enjoy your willingness to teach useful, non-destructive techniques, and warn of the others. Great work, sir.
Saw someone ask why this doesnt happen at Xbox or PS store. Its because there a very big barrier of entry that includes testing of the game and its performance before its even accepted at the store, theres a quality barrier and a checkup, you dont just drag and drop dogshit on the platform.
I don't know how people miss the definition of Money Laundering, the name implies the meaning! Criminals take illegal money (or "dirty" money) and use methods like the ones he describes to make it legal again (now "cleaned" money). This was one of the best descriptions I've seen so good job!
My sponsor had this happen to her using A.I. voice to manipulate her thinking it was her son. She kinda knew it could be a scam but she was so afraid, panic and felt like she didn't want to risk it... she lost $10k so please beware of A.I. too.
Scammers tried the same police scam with my mom a few years ago. I had a car accident, someone died and now i would face jail they told her. The only thing that made her suspicious was the fact that i had no car and she brought me to work that morning. She called after she said she had no money and hang up to make sure i was ok. I was shocked at this method, since i never heard of this kind of scam before.
0:31 It's not a scam, it's a rip-off. It's just a bad deal. The last example (grandma story) is a scam. People should stop using these two terms as synonyms as they are completely different.
It acts like it's all 92% off when only a few are, I personally consider that deceptive and a scam. If they were all listed as 92% off but still really expensive, that is just a ripoff. Idk, this is definitely on the line between a rip-off and scam.
@@boscorner Sure, it probably should say "up to 92%" or something, which is commonplace in these situations (which is a tactic that I still find quite displeasing tbh). But when you scroll down, it's quite clear what you're buying: every item is listed, its price (including which ones are not at full price) and if you buy them you do get them. But I get it, I'm all in favour of the utmost transparency possible. That's why I'm an awful businessman.
@@user-ii7xc1ry3xno, it does not say up to 92% off, we can clearly see 2 things, first is that it says -92%, second that the full price when compared to the discounted price is not mathing to 92%
@@HIYS I didn't understand your comment. But again, just to be clear, scams and rip-offs are different, including from a legal pov. Although I'm no specialist in American law, I'm not sure this would be considered a scam; like boscorner said, it is somewhere in the middle. But I can tell you that at the very least, in most of Europe and vastly across Asia and Africa this wouldn't be enough to be considered a scam, and Europe tends to be much more uptight with these things, so that is probably the exact same case in USA.
My mum is one of those people. Luckily I told her a while back to ask me if she thinks anything is a scam or she gets an unexpected text etc. Now she can recognise them herself and ignores them.
There is also something similar on game stores. You see games listed at "normal" prices ($30-60), and then they go on 80-90% off. But when you look at them, they are ssimliar to $1 phone games, and you end up paying normal to overprice for small shitty games.
Money laundering schemes *could* also work as scams, as long as you don't care about people reporting your scam to, you know, the precise people you're trying to hide your activities from in the first place. Money laundering usually looks like a business open for years and you've rarely ever seen a customer go in. A restaurant with one or two customers a day for years? Money laundering. You know what that restaurant doesn't ever want? Attention. And scamming people out of hundreds or thousands of dollars for an asset flip gets a lot of attention.
Wenever I want to get a new game, I go through the reviews, the not recommending ones, to see what they about it. If their critics are relevant to me, if the same stuff comes back again and again, etc...
hey man, somehow YT recommended your channel and i'm glad they did. subed. also i'm sorry about what nearly happened to your grandma man, that story really pisses me off and makes me even more angry towards scammers. these people needs to be hunted down and stopped at all costs. just terrible people. I'm glad shes fine. your story reminded me of what nearly happen to my dad, nearly got scammed too. :( but yeah luckily i was around to tell him that it was a scam.
0:41 "Steam is not going to be happy when they find this" - how could they not already know? Surely they have simple analytics and alerts to pick this stuff up, they have all the data.
Why does steam not have measures against stuff like this? I mean.. They could easily scan their library for unusual prices and discounts and then put someone there to check them manually.
Well scanning for discounts on a platform notoriously known for having 70-90% discounts regularly, won't work. Unusually priced items is subjective. There are things that do sell for that price, so you can't flag anything over x dollar as then nothing can be sold for that. That's why the scam works, as dumb as it looks it is easy to just hide in plain sight. The normal person will just avoid it. I mean let's be real steam let garbage games for steam green light go for YEARS without QA'ing the process, that was just asset flips. This is that just in a different shell. But that's why you look for actual good publishers and avoid crap like this. I do agree SOMETHING should be done, but it is a hard thing to automate. Not impossible, I am sure you go do analytics to find the proper combination to flag this publisher and set of games. But price and discount is not it, the bundle of several dozens games and only a fraction of games discounted, would probably be my go to. Or of a bundle of x games is great than y, as 20 games shouldn't be 10000.
@@thekaxmax Then saying they are not "happy about it" is absolut bullshit from their side. Just a nice little lie to make them look like they're the good ones.
The only thing I want steam to do here is to show the correct discount on the bundle. If a bundle has one undiscounted game for $10 and one free game for originally $10; that discount is 50%, not 100%. Of course you can game that by making the discounted game cost $1000, but... meh. People need to learn that discounts aren't value. Always ask "is it worth the price"; never say "high discount, must be valuable".
@@GrotesqueSmurf but making a scam game and wanting 100s of dollars for it is scummy, but not illegal. if they want to overprice their bad games, they can do so.
Years ago my grandparents were almost the victims of the "your grandson is injured in a foreign country" scams. Fortunately, they did think to call my parents to see if I was alright before sending anything.
Thank you for making a big point of the distinction between a scam and not a scam. So many people look at games and decide they are scams just because they don't like the monetization or there's delays or too much stuff is in DLCs, too many bugs whatever. And like yeah, those things can be really bad, but I'd like for the word "scam" to actually have some meaning. For example the game Gladius. Its a 40K game with a ton of DLC and people sometimes call it a scam because of it. That is not a scam. Its a lame pricing model, yeah, and if you bought all the DLCs it would be a lot of money. But you are actually buying a thing and getting that thing and there is no funny business where they pretend you are getting more than that thing. Valid serious complaints are there to be made, but that doesn't make it a scam. Its annoying how often people look at a game and just reduce it to one word. Don't like the pricing? Scam. Slightly old, or not a huge player base? Dead. Bugs from a new patch? Broken. Anyways sorry bit of a rant. Can't imagine how annoying this stuff must be as a dev.
I use to be a Lyft driver, one time a passenger got in my car and he was on the phone, not too out of the ordinary so I start driving. The destination is Walmart, I overhear the conversation and it becomes apparent that he is on the phone with a scammer trying to get him to buy gift cards and give them the numbers so he can “make thousands of dollars instantly” so I stop the car and tell him he needs to hang up because that’s a textbook scam call. He got mad at me for “risking his money” and got out and ordered another Lyft while apologizing to the scammer for the delay and begging them not to hang up cause he needs the money. I did everything I could to convince him but he wouldn’t listen, some people just can’t be helped.
Isn't the steam scam sale called a dark pattern? F2P games sort of do something similar. They charge a bundle of items like 100 dollars then give it a huge discount and is now priced at 10 dollars, it feels like a massive bargain but only because they set the initial price at such a steep price.
This video is a service. Thank you. As someone who lives with my grandfather of 89 I can tell you the scam attempts are serious. Thankfully he always has someone better informed check to be careful
Just gonna be pedantic on one thing - the entire bundle can be put on a discount that the individual items are not. You can have three full-priced games, and still have a bundle containing those games be 90% off, and if you do the math, it really is 90% off of the listed price of the bundle. Them choosing to separately discount individual items as well in the bundle does not make it a scam. That bundle really IS 92% off of its full price. Just looking at the price of the bundle vs the games proves it - the bundle at the 92% sale price is $890. Just five of those games at full price brings you to $1000. If you were paying full price for all of those games, you would be paying far more than $890. You are NOT only getting the 92% on a few specific items. The 92% off is not a scam, as that would be an issue with the Steam store. All of that said, though, them claiming those games are worth $200 at full price IS ABSOLUTELY a scam. Those games are NOT worth even the bundle price, much less that ridiculous full price.
In my family, everyone calls the grandparents by silly nicknames. It started as a joke, but it really helps prevent scams as well. Nobody who’s actually in the family would ever call and say “hi grandma”, and no stranger would ever guess that grandma actually goes by Cheeseburger
We often describe Money Laundering in a 3 stage model. 1 - Placement. 2 - Layering. 3 - Integration. However it's not necessary that all 3 stages must be used. It's also not always about money. It includes all types of tangible and intangible property that has derived from crime. I love how he is educating everyone about this. Working in my field is very interesting and ever changing. We see criminals exploit any and all systems. Would totally recommend that people consider a career in Anti-Money Laundering.
it literally took 1 minute for thor to go from talking about a steam scam to him explaining to his viewers how money laundering works. thanks thor, very helpful
Telltale games used to do this too. Their old complete bundle actually increased the prices of their games so the 60% discount was actually more than buying them individually
Best part i liked about retail was helping people avoid scams. They would come in trying to buy gift cards or send money through a wire and most of the time it was just fine but when someones grandmother is fighting back tears and terrified because someone has been blowing up their phone threatening them and such i take it personally. Can't tell you how many times i walked out of the store and just cussed that person out so much they stopped calling for good. Others were so convinced beyond belief that they had some girlfriend in another state or something that you could not convince them not to go through with it. Fortunately i was within my right to cancel the sale and even though they were pissed they were saved hundreds of dollars if only for the time it took them to go to another store.
My grandma actually got scammed out of $7000 dollars in gift cards because a person called her saying her grandson (my brother) was in jail and they needed a bail. Scary part is someone came to her house and told her about it too.
My mom had someone reach out to her using what she described as her granddaughter's voice to say that she had been carpooling with a friend and they had been pulled over and the police found copious amounts of drugs in the car and she needed money to pay for a lawyer. But that she wasn't in any actual trouble because the drugs weren't hers but she needed money to fight the charges. We knew it was not actually my niece calling, and I have no idea if it was just a generic female voice, or what happened. The scam failed only because of our deep rooted suspicion of everything around us, but I will always remember this example as how crafty they can be. People who scam old people out of their money should be treated like murderers.
That exact scam happened to my coworker earlier this year. Her adult son is in the navy and someone called my coworker's mother and said that her grandson killed someone in a car accident and that he was arrested and needed 10 grand sent to his 'lawyer' right now. She called my coworker and she was panicking, but luckily another coworker and I were able to calm her down enough to get her to call the son before doing anything else. We spent the hour it took to reach the son telling her that no emergency needs payment immediately and they are counting on her and her mother to panic.
Not only was the son fine, he was on a boat when this all happened and even if he was in port, his truck was broke down so no driving anyways. These scams prey on emotion and when you take a moment to think things through they tend to fall apart.
1. That’s horrible but I’m glad she was stopped before she made that mistake.
2. I am so sorry, but it’s worth: “another coworker and I were able to clam her down” clam lol
@@setster007 lol Spelling errors strike at the worst moments
@@TheStormsinger this happens a lot in south america. :/ reporting the scams does nothing
That's why they target women.
Now realize that the exact same tactics work with politics and tricking people into who to vote for.
Who do women vote for?
Survival of the fittest
These games are also used in random steam key bundles that promise to give you only positive rated games. 99% of these bundles are filled with these games.
Good to know. I always assumed those mystery bundles would give me garbage games.
I've gotten a few bad games from them but I've also got some good ones too. Usually when they bundled them and I felt like gamba for 5 bucks for 5-6 games or whatever.
Where exactly do these happen? Because if you're talking about the likes of Fanatical, that's above board but also filled largely with cheaper lower rated products. Which might make it appealing to try and get your asset flip into that pipeline, but the system itself is perfectly legit (beyond how you feel about it acting as a lottery).
@@GrandHighGamer I know G2A offers random key packages and I'd imagine some of the other grey market sites do the same. I've seen them advertised in the past with an average key value which was horribly inflated because of these stupidly marked up games that aren't normally purchased at full price.
One thing that I wish Valve would do that could defeat these scams, start taking reviews of key redeemers into account when generating the game's review rating. Currently, it's only those who bought the game.
4:37 Someone called my grandpa claiming to be “his oldest grandson” and tried scamming him with this fake bail nonsense. I’m his only grandson. He laughed, told them to call someone else, and hung up.
Now whenever I call him I always say “it’s your oldest grandson” and we both laugh
That's so wholesome.
Switch it up by saying "it's your youngest grandson" sometime.
This also means your his FAVORITE grandson
amazing!
They know full well they are gonna get laughed at %99 of the time.
if you don't fall for the scam, it wasn't meant for you.
someone else out there will fall for it.
They tried to pull that bail scam on my grandfather. But they tried to make it seem like I reached out to him because I wouldn't want to tell my parents, but was okay with him knowing. He was like "Yeah, I am not who he would reach out to, this isn't real". LOL. Okay Papa...you are right...but WOW.
Papas smart it’s common especially with AI now
Seems like your grandpa isn’t one to spare the rod huh
Happened to my aunt as well. She was on to them pretty much from the start, but she played along for a bit to see what kind of story they would spin. They told her that I was in a traffic accident, that I got into a fight with the person who I was in the accident with, and got charged with assault, and that I needed bail money. She just told them no, then called me up to tell me about it. It was very strange that they pretended to be me and not one of her actual children, but who knows what goes through these scammers brains.
@@uncleanexecutionit’s because they’re hoping that there’s just enough separation that they can spin their story and get away with it.
They tried it on my Grandma and her response was "Why are you calling me? Call your father." And hung up.
"Give me 10k or he goes to jail forever." "Good, might shake him up a bit. See ya. " That would be my mom, probably.
Will you keep him longer if I give you 20k?
Pretty accurate to me lol
- i don't have 10k to pay you to send him to jail can you give some kind of discount?
- no ma'am... you don't understand
this is mine
My mom would go: Oh finally affordable housing for my son. Keep him!
That would be my dad, definitely.
Dont money launder, its very illegal! instead, bribe a politician its baked in as legal.
Nope. Bribery is super illegal. Just ask former senator Menendez about that.
The legal version is called speaking fees or the advance on all those books that get ghost written by the politician, or the cushy position on some executive board or thinktank when the politician leaves office.
@@ObadiahtheSlim Getting a position on a board of some council that no-one has ever heard of with a baffling salary is a common practice. Like some " Lower New Jersey Water Sanitation Cultural Impact Study Board" type shenanigans
Politicians, the greatest criminals the earth has seen
@@ObadiahtheSlim Legal bribery of politicians is called "lobbying".
@@Greaseman762 noo not a bribe, a gratuity after the fact, totally legit. Even if promised before the act was done, but not paid till after the fact, all good.
Scammers can also rely on convenient timing or insiders working for an associate of the targeted person. My dad was asked for additional money to complete a shipment, which just happened to be around the time he was expecting a large, expensive tractor implement. The scammer wasn't able to answer simple questions like the weight, delivery address, or cost of the item, but the situation almost seemed reasonable before those questions were posed.
Those are often brute force, people are expecting a package or shipment fairly often, so send enough of them and the timing will be right often enough
And that's why you ask questions
I had something almost like that. This was just after the UK left the EU and shipping between the UK and EU got back on track. At this time I worked for Games Workshop at my local warhammer store within the EU. I had ordered some minis for myself, and as per usual had them shipped to the shop so they come in with the stock. Half a week or so later I get a text message, supposedly from UPS (who does shipping for Games Workshop) regarding import costs. The thing is, because I work for the company I knew this wouldn't be an issue. I reported this scam to my boss and sent a copy to UPS of course.
These days I regularly get emails as well with regards to supposed packages being on the way but requiring me to do something to finish delivery, even without anything on the way. The funniest thing about those are the DHL ones because they contain codes but because I currently work for DHL in their sorting process I actually know for a fact the codes are completely wrong and just randomly made up strings of numbers, as DHL usually (there are exceptions) works with a specific kind of format.
Neighbour had a Macbook they hadn't ordered show up at their home. A different courier from the same company turned up about 20 minutes later saying they'd make a mistake and asking for it back. Thing is, the package did have his name and address on. He got suspicious and refused, even after the 'courier' called the warehouse to 'confirm' he was legit. Shut the door and called the seller. They confirmed a laptop had been bought on credit in his name. If he'd handed it over he'd have been on the hook for it.
@@Raxiel497 Jeez. That's a new one. Gotta keep my eye out for that too now.
5:40 this scammer came so close to becoming thors vilian origin story
The neighbor saved the scammer as well as his grand-mother.
IIRC that or something similar is why KitBoga (namedropped in the video) does what he does.
This is basically the plot of _The Beekeeper_ (2024)
of course the plot is a contrivance for Jason Statham to beat up everyone. still a good movie.
@@sigstackfault The writing for that movie was so bad, but I was entertained watching Jason Statham be Jason Statham
@@dakat5131 Yup, this is part of Kitboga's motivation. He's seen it happen in his own private circle.
This almost happened with my Grandma too. Except they pretended to be me in jail, and told her to ship it cash via FedEx to my "lawyer". My grandma had actually gave FedEx the package and drove home. Luckily my older brother was there for lunch and called me and drove her back there and they hadn't shipped it out yet and they were able to get it back.
Then I got to have a lovely conversation with the scammer over the phone and definitely didn't use any hacking skills I had acquired at any point in time.
Malicious Compliance.
your awesome
Should have resent the package but filled it with dog shit
"lovely conversation"
*proceeds to swear so much it would sound like morse code on a tv show*
I saved a neighbor from a similar scam. Scammer called him, said they were a sheriff and they had an arrest warrant for him, give them 5k in itunes gift cards to pay it off and it'll go away. His wife was terminally ill and he couldn't afford to be 5 minutes from her side, let alone the threat of being in jail. So, I saw him running around frantically, asked him what was going on. When he told me, I told him pretty much the same thing: It's a scam, if you had a legit arrest warrant they would have been kicking down your door, not wanting itunes gift cards. Go report it, go to your bank, lock everything down, etc.
"5 minutes" was hyperbole, I take it?
@@GeorgeDCowley In this context, yes most likely.
Why are old people so dumb
Yeah, i wouldve laughed the scammer out of thag call the moment they said "itunes giftcards"
Not credit.
Not cash.
Not debit.
Not even a Visa.
Frickin ITUNES! 😂
Like, how dense do you have to be to set up an ENTIRE SCAM and ask for ITUNES GIFTCARDS?
@@Domboss2019 someone who would pay them in itunes gift cards is someone who is going to fall fully for their scam though. it’s a pretty good screening method to prevent people from reporting them, i guess. idk what they do with them once they have them though. resell maybe?
This happens on black Friday as well. They hike the price up weeks before, then black Friday comes around and are able to sell it for the same price they were selling it previously as a "deal"
That one happens all the time on Amazon as well.
There'll be a major site wide sale going on, but most of the items "on sale" are actually at their original price, and they simply raised the base price before using the sale to bring it back down.
@@randinho8872 not only that, but stores also use a similar technique to say the sale is "up to 80% off". They'll mark down a bunch of random accessories to 80% off but then anything of value lucky to get more than 15% off.
Steamdb is your friend on these times 😉
Hence why I wishlist stuff I want and watch the price. If they jack it up I know that company is full of shit and I find a different company selling it to buy from.
@@andretimpa I use Keepa for Amazon which tracks how much products were before and during any sort of Amazon special days and Steamdb to find out where the cheapest country is to feasibly buy games cheaper from 🤣
"Oh he's not gonna explain this with a box?... oh wait yup, there's the box"
Box technology works
Is this the Block chain I've heard so many good things about?
@TheHyperfilthered red snapper very tasty. Or do you want is inside the box? She chose the box! What is inside the box? Nothing? Absolutely nothing? Stupid! You're so stupid!
UHF, i love that movie
Box and Button based Testing, the foundation of all science.
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I love how the guy says that the steam thing “isn’t how money laundering really works”. Then describes how money laundering works that can definitely be achieved via the steam bundles. I think it’s just his manner of speech but it’s interesting
Reminds me of that one time I got called to be notified that I had gotten into an accident and had to pay for operating fees... all because my own number was my emergency contact during an event.
You werent put behind the bars?
@@louieberg2942 what for? Incorrectly filling out a form? Or messing with the scammer for fun?
@@louieberg2942 what for? Incorrectly filling out a form?
Did you live?
Worth noting the scammers you talk about often ask for something stranger than a simple wire transfer, like a prepaid debit card from walmart or a gift card. Bank tellers are more likely to recognize these scams and have more obligation to prevent people from getting owned by them than a walmart employee. For a lot of people this would be an obvious sign this isn't official, but if you're an elderly person who's already behind the times regarding technology and money, that's a different story.
Here's something interesting. In some places, if you refuse to sell someone gift cards, you can lose your job. Not many jobs allow you to refuse service to someone. So if you work at say, Walmart, or Kroger's, or a dollar store. You have no choice but to sell these $400 worth of gift cards to old mawmaw.
@@RedCyberLizzie I don't know if that's true anywhere, but it's definitely not true at Walmart.
Regular cashiers are specifically not allowed to sell gift cards over a certain amount or large numbers of them, and the service desk people who _are_ allowed to are told to check for those scams and refuse the sale if it sounds off.
There is a fairly straightforward rule you can teach your relatives to deal with this. There is no legitimate entity in the universe who will accept a gift card as payment for any good or service, except for the company that issued it. Anyone who asks for gift cards as payment, for anything, is a scammer or some other kind of criminal, unless their logo is on the gift card.
(Technical exception: There are a few small businesses who will barter off-brand gift cards for goods and services, if the customer is unable to afford a necessary product such as food. They do not call people and ask for gift cards, and it is certainly not their preferred form of payment.)
For that matter, anyone who calls and asks you to pay them right now is probably a scammer or a collections agent. Legitimate creditors will send you a bill or paperwork of some kind, and will generally expect payment within some number of business days, not "right now."
@@grimwolf9988Saw this happen yesterday actually. Lady in front of me troed to buy a $500 apple card and a $50 one, but there is a maximum of $500 per customer per day. Caused a whole situation with managers asking if she was buying them as gifts or cause someone told her too.
From having seen Kitboga the last year, the scammers have upped their game. They are actually using wire transfers now, they just go out of their way to make sure their target shares as little info as possible.
actual goat neighbor saved thors grandma.
Yeah, my grandparents were saved by the fact they are always friendly with their bank teller who told them it was probably a scam and they should check on it before they do anything. Still boils my blood to this day that someone almost got thousands of dollars out of them using my name.
Not only that but my grandma was confused enough that she was convinced that I had tried to scam her out of money, more than likely she passed away believing that.
@@TheNitroG1 That last bit is honestly the part that sucks the most. :(
I'm so glad Thor is always warning against jumping to conclusions. It is so common nowadays especially online for people to just instantly label something without any proof.
Like that time when he said everyone complaining about AC: Shadows were all just racists who were angry about having a black protagonist? I guarantee not a single person has ever said that to him or anyone else. Yet there he went happily spouting journalist-tier slop. No issue jumping to conclusions there, but woe is me for potentially misusing the phrase "money laundering" cuz yeah that'd be such a tragedy omg 🙄🙄🙄
@@armandoalvarado5840 youtube users understand nuance challenge: impossible
@@armandoalvarado5840 lets not act like all racist on twitter didn t jump on the occasion to rant about AC shadow. Like you can t ignore the people that spammed the picture of a monkey in samurai armor.
@@armandoalvarado5840 bro te dejaste el cerebro en el autobus o qué?
@@armandoalvarado5840get a load of this loser
it really bugs me that steam allows the fact that all publishers (including AAA) can say "games on sale UP TO 90%!" and its always for games that i dont care about and buried with games i want.
Yea, that -90% is for some MTX thing that costs $3 to begin with.
steam doesn't know what games you care about, put a game you care about on a wishlist and it will tell you when it goes on sale
@@rougenarwhal8378thats the way. Ive got a wishlist 200 games deep. And i just watch my email for when i see something i actually want on 80% sale
2K does the same with their games.
Stellaris and Civ have both been observed with their cost increased during discounts to look like they are on sale.
I'm sorry, what is the issue here? The fact that what is on sale isn't something you want is not an issue that needs to be addressed.
A word of advice about scammers in general: don't you ever dare to think that you're too smart/informed to be scammed by anyone. Scammers are always inventing new and nuanced ways to trick people. Always have your guard up/question things.
Social version of viruses, essentially. Things that work are replicated, things that don't work die out.
3:39 goated chatter "the design is very human"
Money laundering was a right pain in the arse when I worked at the bookies. Used to get people come in, put couple grand in a betting machine then print the ticket off without making a bet, you then hand them back the clean money.
"How Much Money Can We Launder In A Day?" by Boy Boy on TH-cam showed this to a tee. A lot of the bookies there straight up didn't care that they were doing this.
@@IdoMuffinof course they don't care, they'll just be wasting time. Those kind of people know they rules and the limits
If you has suspicion and you failed to report, then you are committing a crime yourself
@@jarmoo900Bit harder when you work at a place that has a lot of people or to be blunt probably doesn't treat their employees well enough to care
@ellagage1256 I work as an AML Investigator for a bank that has millions of customers. Whilst I can empathise with the fact that you might not get treat fairly, when you realise that the money you're helping launder can be supporting human trafficking or people being exploited for their bodies, I'd rather act with integrity and think about the impact I could have on victims.
I work for a regional bank in the US and I see scams like these alarmingly often. I have seen threats of cp, hurt or jailed family members, romantic partners, even fake jobs with REAL paperwork and forms. It is truly terrible, and the amount of paranoia we have to walk around with in our day-to-day jobs is rather disheartening. Please stay vigilant and ask "why" to everything.
Why do I need to stay vigilant and ask "why" to everything?
@@Dazllingston it’s to keep them busy. If you repeatedly respond with “Why” you’ll waste the scammers time to protect elderly victims they could be trying to get rather than you. Eventually they will leave of course but it works for a solid bit. I think “Ok” is better though because they’ll repeatedly think you’re going to give them what you want so they’ll go for longer.
@@goldengold8513 i think they were trying to be cheeky by applying the advice of asking why to everything by asking why to said advice _about_ asking why
@@NickAsNickName ohh
2:40 precision in language is so important and feels lost these days, especially when people will casually say stuff like "i got hacked." no, you were probably a victim of social engineering and freely gave away what information was required for you to be "hacked." if you're not precise in defining the problem or what's happening, it just serves to obfuscate the problem more.
Or they used some free vpn and they get their session stolen
If you think about it though, they're right.
They got hacked, as in their human self got hacked, rather than their computer system or account getting hacked.
yeah. hacking is actually a pretty general term. Like "assault". It applies to a wide variety of activities.
"Hacking" is just a pretty broad word, it doesn't automatically imply some kind of breach or tech security issue, social engineering counts. The general point any accurate language is true though
@@Cruxin I've done some CTFs and I have regular training on my company. From what I remember the definition of hacking is (aka the most commonly accepted) to intentionally getting unauthorized access to a devices or network. This also includes prolonging accesses for more than you should and tricking people into giving you access
My dad almost got scammed of everything in his bank account before.
We were talking and his phone rang. Apparently it was "America Bank". I thought nothing of it at first, so I left. As soon as I stepped foot in my room, I knew I was missing something very important. I managed to sprint back and convince my dad to hang up. It took nearly 4-5 minutes of me questioning when my dad finally asked what bank the caller was from and realized that America Bank is not a bank we are affiliated with.
Holy crap, that exact thing happened to my Grandma. She hung up on them to go get the money and then "called me back" to ask a question. She called my actual phone, though, so I was able to help her calm down and see what was happening.
I have never in my life been so enraged. I don't like violence, but I would have 100% undone those people if they were in front of me at any time that day.
Friend of mine almost had his aunt getting scammed by the encryption scam.
Sole reason she didn't get scammed was because she acted normal, she got the message that she has to pay up or all her data will be lost and since she didn't have gift cards at home she obviously turned off the PC while getting them - when she came back it was gone, as it was the average one that's just a browser pop up.
The scammers essentially lost their "income" by someone doing the unexpected (just like in your case): Acting normal despite falling for it.
But agreed on the anger towards them, if there's a group of people that deserves all the hate than it's cowards like them, they don't even have the balls to be actual cowards that backstab people, so now that I'm thinking about it calling them cowards might actually be an insult towards cowards as they don't even reach that height of being respectable.
Politicians: "Money laundering? You mean lobbying and smart investments."
Yes, criminals often think they are smarter than everyone else.
I'm glad you made the clarification about money laundering. I've seen it being thrown around far too loosely in the last few years.
Yeah...but at the same time he basically all but confirmed it is. Even though it's jumping to conclusions. It's jumping to conclusions in the same way as if you find your child with chocolate all over their face, it's jumping to conclusions to determine that they have been eating their Halloween candy without permission. Because they could have been eating their sisters candy...
@@TheNitroG1 he did not.
I thought I was pretty clever for figuring out how those would connect.
@@BeeTheBee He said it wasn't money laundering, then went on to give an example of how it's used to launder money. What?
@vohkaru131 no, no he did not.
A lot of random internet people go like "only stupid people get scammed".
The scam is not aimed at you, buddy.
From what I understand, they even build in things to weed out people who are not sufficiently susceptible to their ploys.
True but also keep in mind it can happen to everyone. Everyone has sometimes a laps in judgement or moments when they aren't careful enough. Thinking that it can only happen to stupid people is the 1st step to getting scammed one day.
@@louieberg2942 Yeah, all those bot comments are full of typos for instance. A person of average awareness is going to see through it immediately, and that's not their target demographic. They're using the typos, and other methods, to clear out everybody but vulnerable potential marks. Incredibly predatory.
@@needycatproductions6830 Precisely.
It's also an incredibly arrogant, cruel and rather ableist thing to say.
First, people don't choose how intelligent they are, nor do they choose their place of education in their formative years. Acting like you're somehow better for being smarter is completely absurd. You got lucky, stfu. You may well be intelligent, but the only trait you have that you had any actual choice in is being an a**hole.
Second, many scams are specifically targeted at the vulnerable, the deteriorating, or the mentally impaired. These actors rely in part on ableism - this attitude of "oh well, it doesn't affect me, so I won't share any thought for the victims because I'm smort" - to continue their operations unimpeded by the people who can stop it.
My elderly mom just got mail that said her house insurance was about to expire, and she is approved for 3 year home insurance from what looked like her credit union. I told her it was a scam, and not to contact them. I hate these scammers with a passion.
There was an interesting scam going around, people received letters about pirating some show and if they didn't pay up x amount they'd take them to court. "We got all the IP logs" ect. it was 100% targeted at parents or just plain gullible people. I got like 3 different letters trying to get money from me, and I've never watched any of them and never even heard of 2 of them. I think my mom got one too and called me to ask what this meant since she's lived alone for years and years. I told her to used it as tinder and tell all the people she knows to do the same. What I remember they bought some info from ISP brokers and carpet bombed everyone on their lists with those letters whenever they did anything or not.
I just got the same sort of letter yesterday, claiming to be from my bank.
I was getting these weekly for months after I bought my first house a couple years ago! I mailed back the return slips for several of them after filling them with rocks, hoping the post office charges them!
I'd suggest a 2 hour video talking about this problem, but it got copyright striked by some greedy bastard.
Fireborn eh?
@@krispy_kornflake Yep.
very refreshing to see someone use the phrase "copyright strike" instead of "copystrike" lol does this bother anyone else or do i need to end it all asap via my 2004 toyota avalon?
@@hueybaloney8429I'm sorry but I have never seen anyone say copystrike
@@hueybaloney8429 I will copystrike your comment
I work at a CPA firm and I want to say that what Thor is referring to is converting credit card money into clean money so it's not traceable, but it is not how we would define laundering.
Laundering businesses absolutely can and often are owned by the individuals who commit crimes, it is about taking money already untraceable and in your posession and funneling it through a legal business as "paying customers" so that tax can be paid on it and deposited in the bank accounts as legally earned money.
Two different things.
To make sure I get what you're saying:
"Laundering" is specifically for money that isn't legitimately in the banking system, and therefore hasn't had tax payed on it so any spending done with them would immediate bring the IRS to your door. With the stolen credit cards thing, the money is already legally in the system, you're just obfuscating the path from the money to you that way you can't be implicated with the theft.
Assuming I got all that correct, is there a separate term for that second one?
@ Yea, basically. If I have your credit card information and I want to get money out of it without the police finding me I run a scam to get the money without it being directly traceable to me. That's not technically laundering how we think of it when it comes to financial crimes.
Laundering is "I have all this money by illegal means already, how can I spend it and explain where it came from?", so you run it through a legitimate business as sales revenue and boom, you've created a legitimate paper trail for the funds.
Laundering is something the guy from Thor's example would do after he obtained the money if it were a substantial sum, like say $50,000-$100,000.
@@LazarNaskovNot sure if there is a term fornit but you're correct
From what is shown, I counted over 20+ games listed as $199 (that's 4k at least.) The total is listed as 10k and on sale at 92% off for a total price of $800, which is 92% off. Thor highlights that "only a few are marked down", but in reality, the whole thing is. The individual marked down games have their own separate sale, and the others are full price outside of this deal. Sure, there's no reasons that they should be $199, but the way this is presented is... "only a few of them are on sale", when they technically all are within this bundle. The implication is that it says "92% off" because "a few of the games are on sale", when the total price is actually 92% off. The scam here is more akin to price gouging. It's still totally a scam, but this presentation and reasoning is horrible. I'm a bit disappointed no one else noticed this and a little disappointed in Thor for presenting it this way.
You're not the only one but unfortunately way too few have as it seems. Not many turning their brains on for a rough estimate.
Yea Thor ist also just a huma- I mean Goblin who makes mistakes.
I noticed that assumed that the total of 800$ was straight up wrong because of Valve Spaghetti.
commenting for reach cuz i think this should be top or pinned
Yeah..I did notice that on screen there's like 15 games on screen for 200..which would be 3000 so the numbers don't add up the way he presented otherwise the bundle would still be like 3k from those games alone that wernt marked down.
I worked in retail and the amount of older men buying $500 worth of Amazon gift cards for a "fiancé" they've never met seemed way higher than you'd expect. I'd ask them if they were sure about this, if they actually met the other person, etc., but the more you implied that they might be getting scammed the more defensive they'd get so we'd let them complete the transaction to avoid causing a scene but it always felt bad.
We also had scammers calling the store directly posing as our IT department and trying to get gift card codes over the phone. My coworker went as far as to activate hundreds of dollars in Apple gift cards before he realized something wasn't right, but thankfully he refused to read codes over the phone.
4:30 this happened to my grandparents to. The exact same scam. I walked in the door 5 minutes after they paid the person and I gotta say I've never seen a man go from worried to pissed at themselves so fast before or since.
Can you imagine almost scamming a nice old lady out of $10k and then finding out later that was Thor's grandmother?
That's like running over a dog in a getaway from a bank heist and then later finding out that dog belonged to John Wick.
Common one like with your grandma is the "It's me" scam. They call up older people and say "Hey grandma it's me." and grandma will go "Jimmy?" or "Johnny" or whatever and let the older person fill in who they think is calling them. After that it's usually a "I'm in jail and need bail money" or something along those lines.
It's like cold reading, à la mediums and psychics. The other party fills in the gaps for you if you prime them to do it. If the scammed person doesn't play ball, they move on. Sick, sick game.
Pretty sure there was a case recently of a bussiness (might have just been a person) getting bankcrupted cause hacker used ai to fake being their boss and convinced the vp to "invest" in some scam thingy.
That's like the "most expensive games on steam" bundle.
Nah, it's the cheapest games on steam, rebadged
@@thekaxmax no, I'm talking about a bundle titled "the most expensive games on steam" that is a pack of overpriced shovelware.
My favorite money laundering trick, is when you have made fake bills. You used to in ancient times, actually launder it to roughen it up a bit. Because crisp bills are super sketch apparanrly
well yea, if you saw someone walk into your place of work in ragged clothes and they start handing over crisp just-printed 100's you would understandably be more concerned than a construction worker handing you a ratter roll of 100's that look smeared in sweat and grease from a day of work. sometimes construction workers go to places for a power tool or 3 needed for a job and the manager gives them either a card or cash...though its usually a card in current year.
"This scam won't work on me cause I don't *have* $900 to blow on Steam games!"
4:26 My grandfather was called once with the claim that I had been arrested in Florida and needed bail. He wasn’t sure about it so he gave my dad a call asking if I was ok. He responded yea he’s doing some yard work with me right now. We were at home in Massachusetts. Thank god he called us first
My grandma got a similar scam call about my cousin in jail. She knew it was probably a scam, but wanted to be sure, so she asked to hear his voice. They hung up.
Same issue you had with your Grandma happened to one of my tenants in low income housing. Lady was emotional and crying when she came down the elevator. She told me what happened, but was very reluctant to do so. I called the police to my office and had her explain the situation and give over as much information as possible for them to identify the caller. I do not know if anything ever came of it. I remember that lady thinking she would never see your grown daughter again. I had to almost force her to call the daughter, there is something about shame and fear that allows this scam to happen and should be explained to older parents. At some point when your parents become incapable of making good decisions is when many sons and daughters start taking over accounts and explaining these scams, I warn you: "It is never soon enough".
Small point of reference, it's only money laundering if both parties are aware that it's money laundering. If for example someone offers someone else $1000 to give them $700 back, is it suspicious? Of course, but unless the second party knows it's criminal there is no crime being perpetrated on their end. It's called plausible deniability. And this goes back to the way the legal system works. In order to prove that money laundering occurred one of the elements you have to prove is INTENT. Without intent, there is no crime. So as much as the legal authorities may hate it, they can't actually charge an unwilling party with money laundering and secure a conviction. Which is why in a vast majority of the cases they try to scare the party into a plea deal.
Is there no duty on the recipient's side for some due diligence?
@@louieberg2942 no, because it isn't a contractual obligation. The only way there's due diligence is if there's a written contract. Generally when it's a person to person transaction it's never required. Most of the time you'll see it only in giant business transactions between companies or property.
No, you should automatically assume something is wrong, why would someone give you 1k for you to sent 700$ back, there no other choice then cleaning money. There is really no suspicion to have its quite clear.
You should never accept this kind of transaction, because none of these kind of transactions would be legitimate
@@siyano suspicion is not proof. And that's the point. The legal system is clear about this, you have plausible deniability until they can prove you don't.
I am pretty sure you are still in the trouble ether way, and this is one of those 'cops can't tell lies' type of myth. IDK though, in general taking legal knowledge from the comment section on youtube is not advisable
luckily, I never even drill down in steam to even see these types of games. If it isn't on a recommend or the front page, I don't see it.
2:00 would it still be a crime if you just kept the money….? Like all of it say you’ll give him the 700 but don’t
@@cornmilkwastaken yes, it would, becuz the money is still stolen
Id assume yes because it's still illegally acquired money, if the streamer is unaware and just wanted to keep the money they probably would have it confiscated
Like he said in the video about 25 seconds later, they can just charge the money back
Actually baffling to me that this kind of trash is still up on Steam.
the greedy company steam? you're that baffled? cmon
They unfortunately can't see everything. So a lot slips through.
@@siqsteen "greedy"
@@siqsteen Lets be honest here, as shocking as it may be, EVERY company is about making money, hell even non-profit companies need to manage and procure funds from somewhere, but Steam, whether they are greedy or not, is still one of the companies that is trying to provide a good service, precisely because they want people to keep using it so they can make more money.
So yeah, it's baffling that scammers can operate on the platform so openly and for a long period of time, because it makes Steam look bad, which in turn erodes the trust and confidence of potential customers.
Steam is one of the less greedy companies out there lol. A 30% cut for reputation, customer service, payment / refund handler, foruns, gift system, controller support, etc is a fair cut.
Nice explanation. I used to work in a hotel resort in reservations and we would sometimes get huge reservation requests and the person would pay one way (bank transfer/credit card) and right before the cancellation window they would email us pleading, saying their house got foreclosed, their dog died, they crashed their car, their wife has cancer (sometime multiple of these all in one email lol) and that in that chaos they lost access to their original payment method. Then they would ask to get the refund on a different bank account/credit card etc. They were relatively easy to spot, but if you booked this reservation and charged them, you would be in a world of trouble with our manager lolol
My Grandma got targeted by the same scam. If not for the fact that I never get in trouble like that they might’ve got her. I’m terrified of how these scams will evolve due to AI.
This is basically the modern day version of those 50-in-one game packs they used to sell to unsuspecting grandmas when I was a kid
Every day i get phone calls telling me i owe the sherrifs department hundreds of dollars
Man I've had to tell likely over a 1000 people "Sorry mate I'm afraid you have been scammed, please contact your bank and the police." Comes in waves and yes heartbreakingly it's all to often the elderly.
Not jumping to conclusions is a concept with a universal adapter on it. Never a bad idea.
My grandmother called me once while I was at work, and I was like, yeah I'm fine, just at work. It was a money jail or debt or some sort of scam thing, and she was savvy enough to call me first. Only ever happened once. I was in the cafeteria doing one of my rounds as a security guard at a government contractor site, I was in the kitchen and I wished her well. I haven't forgotten it because it was such an interesting call to have.
Yeah, I love that point about not jumping to conclusions. Something involving money can be bad without being a scam. People throw that word around way too easily.
I had the exact "your grandson is in jail" scam happen to my grandmother as well. That's wild.
a couple of weeks ago in germany there was this elderly guy who countered a scammer and made him meetup at the bank - with a police parade - though in this kind of scenario, the young scammer was (probably) only a tool for a bigger ring.
A couple of weeks beforehand, an elderly couple elongated the phone conversation with the scammers, so while she was talking with the scammers, her husband called the police to counteract.
It's kind of mind-blowing to think there are whole office spaces dedicated to these sorts of schemes. Makes you wonder how many people must fall for it if they're investing that much money.
@@Herr_Affe Here's the thing: You don't need that many people to fall for it for it all to be worth it. If you're from some country with a much lower minimum wage (e.g. most of Eastern Europe), manpower is relatively cheap and attempting these scams is actually quite fast. If every call (even failed ones) takes 15 minutes, you can do 32 of them in an 8 hour day. If 1/1,000 people fall for it, that's ~1 month of 8 hours a day work for one scam. That sounds like it shouldn't be economical, but in a country where the average wage is
My grandparents got the "he's in jail" scam, we hadn't had contact in years, but they hung up because it was an Indian caller lol
Even older folks are getting to the point they just hang up on Indian callers, because it's usually scammers.
The pictures are also stolen from other goods. 4:17 the Builder is the Polygon Construction Pack by synty.
"High prices is not money laundering"
*Immeadeatly describes how x person would use high prices to obtain money to launder it*
I love you maldavius. keep doing what you're doing
5:02 My grandma actually got scammed the same way
Wonderful and succinct explanation of money laundering, and how it differs from the scam. Steam need to get a team on this sort of thing, but, as you have mentioned before, IT is the least appreciated, least funded, and usually the lowest staffed portion of any corporation. More users pointing these things out may move Steam in the right direction, but only if Steam does not care about the loss of revenue. New subscriber, so it's my first comment. I do enjoy your willingness to teach useful, non-destructive techniques, and warn of the others. Great work, sir.
Saw someone ask why this doesnt happen at Xbox or PS store.
Its because there a very big barrier of entry that includes testing of the game and its performance before its even accepted at the store, theres a quality barrier and a checkup, you dont just drag and drop dogshit on the platform.
I don't know how people miss the definition of Money Laundering, the name implies the meaning! Criminals take illegal money (or "dirty" money) and use methods like the ones he describes to make it legal again (now "cleaned" money). This was one of the best descriptions I've seen so good job!
My sponsor had this happen to her using A.I. voice to manipulate her thinking it was her son. She kinda knew it could be a scam but she was so afraid, panic and felt like she didn't want to risk it... she lost $10k so please beware of A.I. too.
Scammers tried the same police scam with my mom a few years ago. I had a car accident, someone died and now i would face jail they told her. The only thing that made her suspicious was the fact that i had no car and she brought me to work that morning. She called after she said she had no money and hang up to make sure i was ok. I was shocked at this method, since i never heard of this kind of scam before.
0:31 It's not a scam, it's a rip-off. It's just a bad deal. The last example (grandma story) is a scam. People should stop using these two terms as synonyms as they are completely different.
It acts like it's all 92% off when only a few are, I personally consider that deceptive and a scam. If they were all listed as 92% off but still really expensive, that is just a ripoff.
Idk, this is definitely on the line between a rip-off and scam.
@@boscorner Sure, it probably should say "up to 92%" or something, which is commonplace in these situations (which is a tactic that I still find quite displeasing tbh). But when you scroll down, it's quite clear what you're buying: every item is listed, its price (including which ones are not at full price) and if you buy them you do get them. But I get it, I'm all in favour of the utmost transparency possible. That's why I'm an awful businessman.
It is a scam buddy. Your just needing to be different. I used to do that also lol.
@@user-ii7xc1ry3xno, it does not say up to 92% off, we can clearly see 2 things, first is that it says -92%, second that the full price when compared to the discounted price is not mathing to 92%
@@HIYS I didn't understand your comment. But again, just to be clear, scams and rip-offs are different, including from a legal pov. Although I'm no specialist in American law, I'm not sure this would be considered a scam; like boscorner said, it is somewhere in the middle. But I can tell you that at the very least, in most of Europe and vastly across Asia and Africa this wouldn't be enough to be considered a scam, and Europe tends to be much more uptight with these things, so that is probably the exact same case in USA.
My mum is one of those people. Luckily I told her a while back to ask me if she thinks anything is a scam or she gets an unexpected text etc. Now she can recognise them herself and ignores them.
3:15 “more like this” the Sims is first.
GOTTEM LMAOOOOOO
There is also something similar on game stores. You see games listed at "normal" prices ($30-60), and then they go on 80-90% off. But when you look at them, they are ssimliar to $1 phone games, and you end up paying normal to overprice for small shitty games.
I'm a firm believer in "if it sounds too good to be true, it is".
Thor: "We know it's a scam. We don't know if it's money laundering."
Multi-class Criminals: "Why not both?"
Money laundering schemes *could* also work as scams, as long as you don't care about people reporting your scam to, you know, the precise people you're trying to hide your activities from in the first place.
Money laundering usually looks like a business open for years and you've rarely ever seen a customer go in. A restaurant with one or two customers a day for years? Money laundering.
You know what that restaurant doesn't ever want?
Attention.
And scamming people out of hundreds or thousands of dollars for an asset flip gets a lot of attention.
Wenever I want to get a new game, I go through the reviews, the not recommending ones, to see what they about it. If their critics are relevant to me, if the same stuff comes back again and again, etc...
hey man, somehow YT recommended your channel and i'm glad they did. subed. also i'm sorry about what nearly happened to your grandma man, that story really pisses me off and makes me even more angry towards scammers. these people needs to be hunted down and stopped at all costs. just terrible people. I'm glad shes fine. your story reminded me of what nearly happen to my dad, nearly got scammed too. :( but yeah luckily i was around to tell him that it was a scam.
0:41 "Steam is not going to be happy when they find this" - how could they not already know? Surely they have simple analytics and alerts to pick this stuff up, they have all the data.
I hope you gave that neighboor a hug, she is an unsung hero and saved both of you so much heartache with her simple intervention.
Why does steam not have measures against stuff like this? I mean.. They could easily scan their library for unusual prices and discounts and then put someone there to check them manually.
Well scanning for discounts on a platform notoriously known for having 70-90% discounts regularly, won't work. Unusually priced items is subjective. There are things that do sell for that price, so you can't flag anything over x dollar as then nothing can be sold for that. That's why the scam works, as dumb as it looks it is easy to just hide in plain sight. The normal person will just avoid it.
I mean let's be real steam let garbage games for steam green light go for YEARS without QA'ing the process, that was just asset flips. This is that just in a different shell. But that's why you look for actual good publishers and avoid crap like this.
I do agree SOMETHING should be done, but it is a hard thing to automate. Not impossible, I am sure you go do analytics to find the proper combination to flag this publisher and set of games. But price and discount is not it, the bundle of several dozens games and only a fraction of games discounted, would probably be my go to. Or of a bundle of x games is great than y, as 20 games shouldn't be 10000.
But that costs money that could go to an exec's harem
@@thekaxmax Then saying they are not "happy about it" is absolut bullshit from their side. Just a nice little lie to make them look like they're the good ones.
The only thing I want steam to do here is to show the correct discount on the bundle.
If a bundle has one undiscounted game for $10 and one free game for originally $10; that discount is 50%, not 100%.
Of course you can game that by making the discounted game cost $1000, but... meh. People need to learn that discounts aren't value. Always ask "is it worth the price"; never say "high discount, must be valuable".
@@GrotesqueSmurf but making a scam game and wanting 100s of dollars for it is scummy, but not illegal. if they want to overprice their bad games, they can do so.
Years ago my grandparents were almost the victims of the "your grandson is injured in a foreign country" scams. Fortunately, they did think to call my parents to see if I was alright before sending anything.
Thank you for making a big point of the distinction between a scam and not a scam. So many people look at games and decide they are scams just because they don't like the monetization or there's delays or too much stuff is in DLCs, too many bugs whatever. And like yeah, those things can be really bad, but I'd like for the word "scam" to actually have some meaning.
For example the game Gladius. Its a 40K game with a ton of DLC and people sometimes call it a scam because of it. That is not a scam. Its a lame pricing model, yeah, and if you bought all the DLCs it would be a lot of money. But you are actually buying a thing and getting that thing and there is no funny business where they pretend you are getting more than that thing. Valid serious complaints are there to be made, but that doesn't make it a scam.
Its annoying how often people look at a game and just reduce it to one word. Don't like the pricing? Scam. Slightly old, or not a huge player base? Dead. Bugs from a new patch? Broken.
Anyways sorry bit of a rant. Can't imagine how annoying this stuff must be as a dev.
I like to think that Thor found the people who tried to scam his grandmother and they were never heard from again.
I have several of these random positive games in my steam library.. thank you bundles xD. .. but that price is ridiculous
SAme. Maybe upwards to 10, because buying the bundle is like 1-2 bucks cheaper than buying the actual game I wanted to buy.
I use to be a Lyft driver, one time a passenger got in my car and he was on the phone, not too out of the ordinary so I start driving. The destination is Walmart, I overhear the conversation and it becomes apparent that he is on the phone with a scammer trying to get him to buy gift cards and give them the numbers so he can “make thousands of dollars instantly” so I stop the car and tell him he needs to hang up because that’s a textbook scam call. He got mad at me for “risking his money” and got out and ordered another Lyft while apologizing to the scammer for the delay and begging them not to hang up cause he needs the money. I did everything I could to convince him but he wouldn’t listen, some people just can’t be helped.
Who came here and got an unexpected free lesson in money laundering
Criminals be like: Write that down, write that down!
Isn't the steam scam sale called a dark pattern? F2P games sort of do something similar. They charge a bundle of items like 100 dollars then give it a huge discount and is now priced at 10 dollars, it feels like a massive bargain but only because they set the initial price at such a steep price.
bruh... and im here screaming that $70 games are a scam, meanwhile people falling for $800, 91% discount scam games packs...
This video is a service. Thank you. As someone who lives with my grandfather of 89 I can tell you the scam attempts are serious. Thankfully he always has someone better informed check to be careful
Just gonna be pedantic on one thing - the entire bundle can be put on a discount that the individual items are not. You can have three full-priced games, and still have a bundle containing those games be 90% off, and if you do the math, it really is 90% off of the listed price of the bundle. Them choosing to separately discount individual items as well in the bundle does not make it a scam.
That bundle really IS 92% off of its full price. Just looking at the price of the bundle vs the games proves it - the bundle at the 92% sale price is $890. Just five of those games at full price brings you to $1000. If you were paying full price for all of those games, you would be paying far more than $890. You are NOT only getting the 92% on a few specific items.
The 92% off is not a scam, as that would be an issue with the Steam store.
All of that said, though, them claiming those games are worth $200 at full price IS ABSOLUTELY a scam. Those games are NOT worth even the bundle price, much less that ridiculous full price.
In my family, everyone calls the grandparents by silly nicknames. It started as a joke, but it really helps prevent scams as well. Nobody who’s actually in the family would ever call and say “hi grandma”, and no stranger would ever guess that grandma actually goes by Cheeseburger
Woah wait! No Thor! You have JUST talked about paying taxes, why is the next video about tax evasion… jesus christ 😂
Sorry I meant money laundering- still processing coffee
@@animuspsycho6973 if only TH-cam allowed you to edit comments....
@@Ael666 aye… if only there was an edit function for comments
@@animuspsycho6973not sure if u know that if u click the 3 dots next to your comment….
"If it seems too good to be true, it absolutely is."
in fairness, people should know better than to buy this trash, but yes people also shouldn't be doing things like this in the first place
Dont boame the victims
We often describe Money Laundering in a 3 stage model. 1 - Placement. 2 - Layering. 3 - Integration. However it's not necessary that all 3 stages must be used. It's also not always about money. It includes all types of tangible and intangible property that has derived from crime. I love how he is educating everyone about this.
Working in my field is very interesting and ever changing. We see criminals exploit any and all systems. Would totally recommend that people consider a career in Anti-Money Laundering.
it literally took 1 minute for thor to go from talking about a steam scam to him explaining to his viewers how money laundering works. thanks thor, very helpful
I have already teach my grandma and grandpa about this stuff and you guys should too as their grandkid
Telltale games used to do this too. Their old complete bundle actually increased the prices of their games so the 60% discount was actually more than buying them individually
Best part i liked about retail was helping people avoid scams. They would come in trying to buy gift cards or send money through a wire and most of the time it was just fine but when someones grandmother is fighting back tears and terrified because someone has been blowing up their phone threatening them and such i take it personally. Can't tell you how many times i walked out of the store and just cussed that person out so much they stopped calling for good. Others were so convinced beyond belief that they had some girlfriend in another state or something that you could not convince them not to go through with it. Fortunately i was within my right to cancel the sale and even though they were pissed they were saved hundreds of dollars if only for the time it took them to go to another store.
My grandma actually got scammed out of $7000 dollars in gift cards because a person called her saying her grandson (my brother) was in jail and they needed a bail. Scary part is someone came to her house and told her about it too.
Amazon does that too. They show stuff that you would like on "sale" but you go back to it months later and its no longer on sale and is the same price
"I watched Ozarks and you just said a huge amount, MUST BE MONEY LAUNDERING" Gotta love the general audience lmao
What kind of person is buying $900 in games at once? Even without the fake discount this just looks like those $10 000 mugs that people put on Etsy.
I hope Thor bought his grandma's neighbor a nice pie.
My mom had someone reach out to her using what she described as her granddaughter's voice to say that she had been carpooling with a friend and they had been pulled over and the police found copious amounts of drugs in the car and she needed money to pay for a lawyer. But that she wasn't in any actual trouble because the drugs weren't hers but she needed money to fight the charges. We knew it was not actually my niece calling, and I have no idea if it was just a generic female voice, or what happened. The scam failed only because of our deep rooted suspicion of everything around us, but I will always remember this example as how crafty they can be. People who scam old people out of their money should be treated like murderers.